Designing is a tricky business. One forgotten element—like halfa logo hanging off the front page of my company newsletter—can be endlesslyembarrassing, for me and my company. I’ve learned to double- and triple-checkfor problems before I distribute a file from Microsoft Office Publisher, and Inever send out anything until I run the Publisher Design Checker. DesignChecker…

Some projects take a lot of tweaking in Publisher—anewsletter, for example. What I want to do is lengthen the first columnand shorten the second and third columns to make room for a handyupcoming-events section. Shifting text and making everything fit seemed likeway too much trouble before I discovered linking text boxes. I would cut asentence…

Keeping up on changes to my company SharePoint site is essential in my job. I need to know about newly added documents, team discussion responses, modified tasks, and many other changes. But scouring the company site for changes would be an endlessly tedious task. Instead, I check only one spot: Outlook. In SharePoint I subscribe…

With all of the templates and features available in Microsoft Word, I have a tendency to never leave its familiar comforts. I’ll spend an hour using the excellent table tools in Word to patch together a complex table before it dawns on me: I don’t really want a table. All I really want is a…

In my last post I talked about how great it is to be able to use RSS feeds in Outlook. Well, it’s also great to use them in Internet Explorer, because there you can add a new feed quickly and view it directly from its website. You know what’s the greatest? Having both capabilities—synchronized. By…

When blogs first started to go big, it was exciting to checkall your favorites for updates. Then you found even more blogs you loved and itgot to be a long list of sites to check, and they didn’t all updateconsistently so sometimes there was nothing new. And then there was that blissful day when you…

Working as a team means dividing up the work. Clearly dividing project tasks and assigning roles is essential to making sure everything gets done. Everybody hates that awkward silence when you realize you all thought someone else was supposed to do a particular task. You can use Tasks in Outlook to assign action items not…

When I first started on SharePoint and I realized I couldn’t move files by dragging them, I panicked a little bit. My first instinct was to save the file to my desktop and then upload it again to the new folder. Talk about a gigantic waste of time! In case there are others out there…

OneNote is the quintessential notepad because you can use it just like you would a pad of handwritten notes, but it’s much more powerful. For instance, when I take notes by hand, I draw stars next to notes I need to remember. Similarly, in OneNote, I can use predefined tags, or create my own, so…

When you’ve worked hard on a project, sending your documents off for approvals is a bit like sending your kid off to college—you sure hope others take good care of it, but ultimately it’s out of your control. With document sets, you can capture version history for more than just the individual documents in the…